On July 22 2009 I posted on the new paper on solar forcing by Lean and Rind 2009 (see). In that post, I also referred to the Benestad and Schmidt 2009 paper on solar forcing which has a conclusion at variance to that in the Lean and Rind paper.

After the publication of my post, Nicole Scafetta asked if he could present a comment (as a guest weblog) on the Benestad and Schmidt paper on my website, since it will take several months for his comment to make it through the review process. In the interests of presenting the perspectives on the issue of solar climate forcing, Nicola’s post appears below. I also invite Benestad and Schmidt to write responses to the Scaftta contribution which I would be glad to post on my website.

GUEST WEBLOG BY NICOLA SCAFETTA

Benestad and Schmidt have recently published a paper in JGR. (Benestad, R. E., and G. A. Schmidt…

No, it doesn’t work like that Ray. Standard wavelets are compact. Near the ends the wavelet hangs off the series, so you have to do something …and they did something silly. We discussed this at WUWT a very long time ago. I’m not sure why this is up for discussion again, but it was good for a quick laugh back then.

It’s up for discussion again because instead of the egregious error bringing about the withdrawal of the paper, it still besmirches the literature and is being cited in new papers by authors notably including Benestad himself, twice, Peter Stott, Cornelis de Jager, and many others.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008JD011639/citedby

also demonstrates that the GISS modelE used by Benestad and Schmidt greatly overestimates the volcano signature and severely underestimate the solar signature and does not reproduce any of the observed climatic oscillations which are necessary to properly interpret climate change.

About the AWG advocates who referenced it, (in particular Lockwood) I think that this is the clear evidence that AGW advocates do not read carefully the papers that they reference, nor they read with a critical mind nor they truly understand math. They are clearly more interested in political advocacy than in science, which is how AGW propagated. And this is also the politics of the IPCC.

Wrapping this series wasn’t so much a bad choice as it was a funny one — the kind you can’t restrain yourself from bursting out laughing at. That’s really about all that needs to be said.

As for the intransigence: That’s a social, psychological, &/or political issue that probably can’t be corrected or even affected by logic. The remedy — if such a thing exists — isn’t as simple as stating the truth …So we have an ethical quandary.

” However, the arguments are quite clear in that paper and in the additional figures that we published as supporting material. Moreover, it is not clear to me how Benestad and Schmidt could conclude that our work is wrong if Benestad and Schmidt acknowledge that they have not understood it. Perhaps, they just needed to study it better.

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perhaps you need to publish your code. It is rarely the case that words can convey as much information as the code. Second, it is well known from empirical studies on replication that researchers themselves cannot replicate their own work when ask to.

Pick 1
1. Your description of your methods was inadequate

2. gavin and rasmus could not follow instructions.

3. You dropped the ball between producing your results and turning them into charts.

The test of #1 as a hypothesis is to have people try to reproduce your results exactly. gavin has failed, Mcintyre has failed. There is evidence ( not proof) that what we know generally is true specificly in this situation. That is, we know generally and from empirical replication studies that words describing methods are often ambiguous. That is why we write code. Words are subject
to interpretation, code works or does not work. There is evidence of 1 being true.

#2. You have evidence of #2 also being true. It is possible for both 1 and 2 to be true. However,
you have no example of anyone able to follow your description and reproduce your work.

When Mcintyre had problems reproducing Mann’s work, he asked for Code. mann refused. Jones was also asked and refused. Science moves forward by standing on the shoulders of others. Hiding work didnt work for them.

Mosh: Benestad and Schmidt made an error by their application of a periodic filter which forces the end value down to be the same as the starting value. That’s a much more egregious error which should have brought about the withdrawal of the paper. Instead, having been made aware of the error, they go on to cite the paper in further work. There’s a word for that.

Can you bring yourself to admit that it’s not Nicola Scafetta’s fault that Benestad and Schmidt can’t apply statistical tools properly? Or will you decide to be complicit with their gross error and subsequent citation of work they know full well is fatally flawed?

To Steven Mosher, do you want to understand that the code to calculate the wavelet decomposition is publicly available and already implemented in statistical packages such as “R” used by Benestad and Schmidt for their calculations?

Benestad and Schmidt’s major error was to use boundary=”periodic” instead of using boundary = “reflection” in the modwt function which introduced large errors and severely erroneous border trending.

Is it so complicated to understand it for you? it is years that you are repeating the same thing as a broken disk.

Moreover as a minor error they have mistaken the time resolution of the record. They used a monthly resolution while they should have followed the detailed instructions of my paper and changed the resolution.

And there are an infinity of other math errors in that paper, and they know it.

I find it funny that people have had trouble replicating Nicola’s work. Mosher always reminds me of students that mooch off brighter students to get answers — and of students who always go begging the teacher for more hints. This just highlights a lack of independent ability.

And to put the spot-light back where it belongs: A few years ago when I first read at WUWT that B&S actually wrapped the series, I involuntarily, abruptly spit-laughed on the screen. It wouldn’t be funny if they weren’t trying to tell us what to think — that sort of “authority” doesn’t go over so well.